I've been rather quiet lately - but for good reason! (We've been really busy!)
Hopefully, by now, you've been hearing a lot of buzz about what is coming in Windows 8 and some great developer experiences coming in Visual Studio 11. Lots of this has been demo'd at the //build conference this week.
You can view the //build conference keynotes here:http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011
You can even download the Windows 8/Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview bits here:
Jeff Braaten from my organization has done a nice summary of some of the new things you can expect from Help Viewer 2.0 on Third Blog from the Sun.
Some highlights:
Just to be really clear about that last point - it is the Help runtime from Help Viewer 2.0 that is in Windows 8 and not the viewer itself. Windows has their own Help experience that they drove off the work we've done on the help runtime. So while this is not the ".chm killer" so to speak, it is good progress.
There are many other features that have been getting baked into Help Viewer 2.0 that will more clearly come online as we get closer to Beta and RTM. Some are true innovations in Help experiences in my (not so humble) opinion. Jeff aludes to some of these as filtering features in his post. Others will particularly light up a number of Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) and localization scenarios. Stay tuned as we move towards Beta and RTM for more details.
As always - let us know what you think!
How do you plan to better support third parties help locally? One issue we run into with our customers is them wanting to leave their help viewer in online mode to take advantage of your online content, but want our help locally. They are consistently having to change from local to online. Granted the switch in the IDE will be nice, but a way that third parties can call the viewer with either online or local would be so much nicer. :)
Other then that, everything sounds good; waiting on a machine right now to install the bits so I can play around with them.
Thanks Geoff - you'll see! :)
What is the command line installer engineers can use to install the help?
I have installed Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview, and Help Viewer 2.0 was working at the beginning, but one day suddenly I found that the Help Agent was not shown in the icon tray and not found in Program Files\Microsoft Help Viewer\v2.0\
I have tried both repair, and uninstalled Help Viewer then repair, but Help Agent was still missing
Can somebody help to tell me how to correctly reinstall the help viewer 2.0? Thanks
@Steve - thanks for your question! I hope the info I sent separately has helped.
@Ethan - VS 11 does not use an Help Agent tray app. That was removed for VS 11. Was there something specific from the Agent that you were looking for? VS 11 talks to the new Help Viewer directly rather than through the ms-xhelp:/// protocol.